In the United States and other countries around the world, the holiday season is here once again. Whether one celebrates Christmas, Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa, early December through early January is filled with activities of visiting family, friends, and neighbors, and participating in holiday specific traditions. In the midst of all this, many are also dealing with both professional and personal struggles. This combination of happiness, enjoyment, and pushing through can be amplified when one is an entrepreneur living with disabilities. The author has personal experience with such matters.
When I was a child, I looked forward to Christmas with so much anticipation that I could barely contain myself. My favorite parts of Christmas were the spiritual meaning, the music, my grandmother’s Christmas cookies, the light displays, and of course, the gifts from Santa Claus! In short, I loved, and still do in a way, everything about Christmas. That said, the last few years have been tempered by the factors mentioned above.
My grandmother passed away on Veterans Day 2021 after many years of living with dementia. Due to both the COVID-19 pandemic and her rapid memory and health decline, I was not able to see her or speak to her in the final years before her passing. Both the circumstances and timing of her passing hit me especially hard because I often celebrated Christmas early at her apartment as a child due to my mother’s work schedule at the time, and before her dementia progressed, she was still a fixture of both my everyday life and Christmas celebrations that my aunt hosted at her home. These celebrations are still an annual occurrence for my family, and I still anticipate and enjoy them, but they do come with a certain amount of sadness as they tend to bring how much I miss my grandmother to the front of my mind even though I feel very strongly that she is watching over me.
In addition to the emotional side of the holidays, I also experience a certain amount of professional stress during this time. Since starting out on the entrepreneurial path, I have made a point of taking a few days before Christmas and a few days after New Year’s off. This means that before that vacation starts, I always have a certain amount of work to finish so that I will not miss deadlines that fall directly before and after this holiday timeframe. These deadlines tend to elevate my stress levels. When this happens, however, I remind myself to give myself some grace, evaluate my schedule, see what is most urgent in regard to my work, and what can be rescheduled. Techniques such as this make balancing holiday plans and professional responsibilities a little less demanding, though they do not eliminate the high-performance standards that I set for myself.
I realize that the circumstances I have described so far could apply to anyone on some level during the holiday season, whether they have a disability or not. That said, when one does have a disability, the whirlwind of circumstances described above, is further complicated by the continuing everyday issues of living with a disability which I have covered to a certain extent in my previous blog segments. Please note that I have not written this segment as a personal pity party, but rather to demonstrate the point that we all live with an often under addressed mixture of circumstances that can tend to become heightened during the holiday season. This does not mean, however, that joy, or at least a spark of hope, cannot be found during this time. In fact, the end of the holiday season is marked by the New Year, which by its very nature is meant to be a time of hope. You can read more about this in my next blog segment, “Disability and the New Year”.